Ourobourous, Antigone & Iphigenia, PG-13
TITLE: Ourobourous
AUTHOR: nextian
FANDOM: Euripides and Sophocles. Uh.
RATING: Let’s call it PG-13.
WARNING: Double character death, sacrifice, references to incest, blood, slight sexuality. In other words, your standard Greek play.
PROMPT: 48) Sometimes it's worse to win a fight than to lose.--Billie Holiday.
SUMMARY: Actually, these characters are public domain, but I did not make them up. Acceptance comes in different varieties.
I.
Antigone was a girl for sixteen years and a mother to her brother-father for one. She thinks she is well-qualified to die.
It is about time, she has decided, and so she picks an unwinnable cause and sets about winning it. She hadn’t even liked Polynieces when he was alive. Even when he came home, mouth smelling of barley-beer. Or Eteocles, his arms locked tight around sweet Ismene, little sweet law-abiding Ismene who makes Antigone want to vomit. Ismene has not carried her father for eight months. Ismene never even saw their father again, not with real sharp clear eyes like Antigone had. You couldn’t see their father unless you’d just spent a week walking with him and finished feeding him and cleaning up their campsite and their father had said “Thank you,” nothing else, and you wanted to kill him so badly you felt it in your clenching fists. That was when honesty broke over you like a tide. She knows. She is the only one who knows.
That is another reason she thinks she is ready to die. No one else ever seems to help her with her hatred. The dead are good at hatred, she is told, and their grievances last forever. It is the thought of that sick continuance that spurs her on.
People call her little Antigone. She has not been little Antigone for hundreds of days now, each one a new ache. She grew up suddenly and with a rush when she realized that she could never have a daughter to teach songs to, because the daughter would be born ill or blind or mad with the polluted blood of Oedipus in her veins. She has not been little Antigone since she looked at Haemon and thought, with love, What a child. She is older than them all now. They think she is a little mad but she will willingly take being a little mad, if the other side of the bargain is being right all the way through. If the blood in her veins is polluted, they may have it, they may have all of it.
The dirt she tosses on Polynieces, a light sprinkling of nothing much at all, is a benediction. The words she spits at Ismene, so that she will not spit on her altogether, are blessings from the dead. She will carry Ismene’s message of love to their brothers. She will kill Ismene in her mind a thousand times before she dies herself. It is Creon that confuses her. She is giving Creon the chance to be just; it is difficult to understand why he is objecting, why he will not play his part the way he’s supposed to. She is ready to die. At least the guard will not look her in the eyes and she knows that he at least understands the role in all of this; the injustice of his justice, the rightness that beats in her veins stronger than blood.
The grave is not a bad one. A rough-hewn square stone chamber, and she does not mind dying there, anymore than she would mind dying anywhere else. It is more homelike than some of the caves she had squatted in with her father. She loves it in the way she loved him, with the same gentle caressing hatred, with the same fierce affection for every hideous wrinkle. The stupid guard spits on the floor and she is annoyed, briefly.
Then they roll the stone over the door and she knows in a blinding flash of clarity that she is not ready to die, and she beats against it till her fists are bloody.
II.
Her father is the one who decides for her, after all. Her father who has never been wrong in his life is rectifying this inaccuracy with one great stroke.
Iphigenia is sixteen and has never been anything but a girl, and she realizes with sudden horrible clarity that she will never be anything but a symbol afterwards, her girlhood purified and therefore taken from her. Almost she begs Achilles to take her there, press his hands to her face and arms and body and make her human and real for one night, but she will, after all, be the symbol they ask of her. And anyway there isn’t time.
Little Orestes cries, but little Orestes always cries. This isn’t anything new. He cries when a favorite toy is taken away, big Iphigenia with her hair perfect for his fist to pull. It is her mother’s tears that nearly break her, that turn her voice hard enough to make them all walk away, so that she can walk on. Her mother never cries. Her mother should not be crying any more than her father should be wrong.
There are twenty-five steps up to the altar and she takes each one deliberately, as slowly as she can. On the first she is purely afraid; on the second she is calm. On the fifth she is so ready her blood almost shatters the extended vein in her neck and spoils it all.
On the twentieth she stops and listens to the roar of the crowd behind her. They are so loud that she wants to tremble. They are so loud that they move her feet themselves, so that she need not do the task of walking. She is shamefully grateful to be spared this, that she can go on.
It is the twenty-fifth that kills her, even before she bends her neck. She is already dead then. She dies the instant her father looks away. It is all right for her then to pull her hair away from her back, so that the knife has a better angle. It is all right to feel that sharp pain, because it is sharp and swift and she is already dead. She thinks with the last bit of her breath that they had not even let her offer a prayer, and she does not mind.
AUTHOR: nextian
FANDOM: Euripides and Sophocles. Uh.
RATING: Let’s call it PG-13.
WARNING: Double character death, sacrifice, references to incest, blood, slight sexuality. In other words, your standard Greek play.
PROMPT: 48) Sometimes it's worse to win a fight than to lose.--Billie Holiday.
SUMMARY: Actually, these characters are public domain, but I did not make them up. Acceptance comes in different varieties.
I.
Antigone was a girl for sixteen years and a mother to her brother-father for one. She thinks she is well-qualified to die.
It is about time, she has decided, and so she picks an unwinnable cause and sets about winning it. She hadn’t even liked Polynieces when he was alive. Even when he came home, mouth smelling of barley-beer. Or Eteocles, his arms locked tight around sweet Ismene, little sweet law-abiding Ismene who makes Antigone want to vomit. Ismene has not carried her father for eight months. Ismene never even saw their father again, not with real sharp clear eyes like Antigone had. You couldn’t see their father unless you’d just spent a week walking with him and finished feeding him and cleaning up their campsite and their father had said “Thank you,” nothing else, and you wanted to kill him so badly you felt it in your clenching fists. That was when honesty broke over you like a tide. She knows. She is the only one who knows.
That is another reason she thinks she is ready to die. No one else ever seems to help her with her hatred. The dead are good at hatred, she is told, and their grievances last forever. It is the thought of that sick continuance that spurs her on.
People call her little Antigone. She has not been little Antigone for hundreds of days now, each one a new ache. She grew up suddenly and with a rush when she realized that she could never have a daughter to teach songs to, because the daughter would be born ill or blind or mad with the polluted blood of Oedipus in her veins. She has not been little Antigone since she looked at Haemon and thought, with love, What a child. She is older than them all now. They think she is a little mad but she will willingly take being a little mad, if the other side of the bargain is being right all the way through. If the blood in her veins is polluted, they may have it, they may have all of it.
The dirt she tosses on Polynieces, a light sprinkling of nothing much at all, is a benediction. The words she spits at Ismene, so that she will not spit on her altogether, are blessings from the dead. She will carry Ismene’s message of love to their brothers. She will kill Ismene in her mind a thousand times before she dies herself. It is Creon that confuses her. She is giving Creon the chance to be just; it is difficult to understand why he is objecting, why he will not play his part the way he’s supposed to. She is ready to die. At least the guard will not look her in the eyes and she knows that he at least understands the role in all of this; the injustice of his justice, the rightness that beats in her veins stronger than blood.
The grave is not a bad one. A rough-hewn square stone chamber, and she does not mind dying there, anymore than she would mind dying anywhere else. It is more homelike than some of the caves she had squatted in with her father. She loves it in the way she loved him, with the same gentle caressing hatred, with the same fierce affection for every hideous wrinkle. The stupid guard spits on the floor and she is annoyed, briefly.
Then they roll the stone over the door and she knows in a blinding flash of clarity that she is not ready to die, and she beats against it till her fists are bloody.
II.
Her father is the one who decides for her, after all. Her father who has never been wrong in his life is rectifying this inaccuracy with one great stroke.
Iphigenia is sixteen and has never been anything but a girl, and she realizes with sudden horrible clarity that she will never be anything but a symbol afterwards, her girlhood purified and therefore taken from her. Almost she begs Achilles to take her there, press his hands to her face and arms and body and make her human and real for one night, but she will, after all, be the symbol they ask of her. And anyway there isn’t time.
Little Orestes cries, but little Orestes always cries. This isn’t anything new. He cries when a favorite toy is taken away, big Iphigenia with her hair perfect for his fist to pull. It is her mother’s tears that nearly break her, that turn her voice hard enough to make them all walk away, so that she can walk on. Her mother never cries. Her mother should not be crying any more than her father should be wrong.
There are twenty-five steps up to the altar and she takes each one deliberately, as slowly as she can. On the first she is purely afraid; on the second she is calm. On the fifth she is so ready her blood almost shatters the extended vein in her neck and spoils it all.
On the twentieth she stops and listens to the roar of the crowd behind her. They are so loud that she wants to tremble. They are so loud that they move her feet themselves, so that she need not do the task of walking. She is shamefully grateful to be spared this, that she can go on.
It is the twenty-fifth that kills her, even before she bends her neck. She is already dead then. She dies the instant her father looks away. It is all right for her then to pull her hair away from her back, so that the knife has a better angle. It is all right to feel that sharp pain, because it is sharp and swift and she is already dead. She thinks with the last bit of her breath that they had not even let her offer a prayer, and she does not mind.